Saturday, March 24, 2012

To merely *approach* the question of the existence of God, I'm already using an intellectual perfection standard to guide the inquiry.

But you can't just have some abstract standard on its own without a system of mind already in place and already referenced as a separate ideality to manage the analysis, including that of itself. This system that self-assumes mind and the ideality of mind through which one's own mind is identified (and therefore self-regarding), is not referenced in the same way as our limited, flawed, forgetful selves are, especially given their tendency toward willed self-contradiction, but is already there as the ultimate prior evaluative truth-deciding system, invariant, beneficial, and already necessary to even function as a mind in the first place. And a mind must function, to be a mind at all.

But criteria don't evaluate or decide what is true. Only minds do. Standards and criteria make no sense and are strictly irrelevant except to an already existing mind that has preferential regard for such intellectual factors by referring to a separate system of cognitive propriety that is treated as an ideal mind. An ultimate of mind is thereby necessarily an integral aspect of an assumed ultimate mind. It doesn't exist all on its own as some kind of ethereal pervasive abstraction, because by itself---and without mind---it has no meaning, significance, or even existence. Only a mind can evaluate and decide what is true, including what is true about the evaluation of that decision's evaluative criteria itself.